Must install Linux

This is a discussion on Must install Linux within the Tech Board forums, part of the Community Boards category; Personally I think the risk is small if you are careful; it's not like 1994 where installing dualboot was a ...

Some people said to me that the vm may not be supported my laptop. Is there anyone that can say more on that based on the facts in the image?

The only point that can be made about the hardware is that it may not support virtualization, which is simply the lack of processor support of hardware virtualization. It is also known as Hardware Assisted Virtualization. It's technologies like Intel's VT-x and VT-d or AMD's AMD-V and AMD-Vi. Specifically, these are processor extensions that provide virtual machines with direct hardware access for faster performance.

But whether your processor supports these technologies or not, is irrelevant when it comes to your ability to run virtualbox. It should run just fine regardless. It's just that without processor assistance you won't be benefiting from a performance increase given by direct hardware access.

In any case, your processor does indeed support VT-x and Extended VT-x. But it lacks support for VT-d because... because... because no one really understands Intel erratic virtualization support along its product line. I'm sure not even people working at Intel.

I was almost ready to go for a solution with vm (or cygwin), but some people said to me that, if I want to take measurements on my projects and experiment with BIG data, etc., then I should go with dual boot (they did not really tell why). Are they correct?

Depends on why and how you want to measure.
You should be aware that virtual machines, due to their nature, won't run as fast or good as bare metal. In typical scenarios, with virtualization support and a virtualization-aware OS, the performance should be negligible for general purpose cases, but if you really, really need every little bit of performance, you may have to go the bare metal route.

So timing something in a VM and without will yield different results and they cannot be compared to each other.
So is it it right or wrong? Only you can answer that. Just keep the above in mind.

As oogaboog stated, cfanatic, Mint is very popular.
It is open software, so yes it is free.

Mario said: "Timing is the worst way to measure performance. It is also the wrong way to do it."
I would say that:
Timing is not the proper way to measure performance.
I think that the ideal and more reliable method is to count how many nodes for a example (when searching on a tree) your algorithm accessed and stuff like that. However, people tend to ask you to measure the time!

I get maybe two dozen requests for help with some sort of programming or design problem every day. Most have more sense than to send me hundreds of lines of code. If they do, I ask them to find the smallest example that exhibits the problem and send me that. Mostly, they then find the error themselves. "Finding the smallest program that demonstrates the error" is a powerful debugging tool.

I started with Ubuntu and I loved it so much I switched to Arch and I'll probably never leave it. I've always been tempted to try Gentoo though.

The only real way to choose a Linux distro though is to ask yourself, and I mean really ask yourself, does it support Gnome 3? Gnome 3 is by far and above the most important part of any modern Linux distro, imo.

The only real way to choose a Linux distro though is to ask yourself, and I mean really ask yourself, does it support Gnome 3? Gnome 3 is by far and above the most important part of any modern Linux distro, imo.

Seriously? Gnome 3 is, to put it bluntly as I am inclined to do, crap.